A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it has value. And like money, it will retain its place in society until we all decide to use something else instead.
The system of higher education isn't going to change because people have too much invested in it, and that investment can never go bad like the housing market or tech stocks did. College graduates will talk about how much they learned, the networking and social experience or of being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking. It isn't possible to question the value of those intangible benefits, or to prove to someone that they could have gained the same things through other means. So the system perpetuates itself.
To be honest, it seems like an unbreakable cycle. Well off kids go to college, get jobs and move into management where they hire other well off kids who also went to college. MOOCs, community/online colleges and vocational schools are emerging as additional options, but most of the decision makers at major institutions attended traditional four year colleges and expect the people they work with to have done so as well.
It seems like the best way to control the cost of education would be to make employers responsible for paying for it, instead of the students. Then market forces would come into play. If a business had to choose between paying $120k to send someone to Harvard or $20k to send them to a state school or community college, then they would have an incentive to evaluate the difference in quality of education and training from the respective institutions. Right now all of the financial risk is placed on students, and businesses get to pick and choose who to hire with relatively little consequence.
Obviously the system isn't going to change any time soon, if ever, no matter how many opeds the washington post publishes.
I would say that a more plausible solution (than somehow making businesses pay for the education of the people they want to hire) is to push actual accreditation off onto 3rd parties.
Imagine there's a trusted business who makes the tests and certifications, and anytime you wanted to hire someone, you'd check to see if they had the relevant certifications. Maybe this person self-taught themselves everything they needed to pass, maybe they went to a cheap institution to receive formal training for the certification, or maybe they went to an expensive one.
Colleges could no longer be more expensive just for the sake of being expensive, the colleges who could educate people to better scores would be worth more. Similarly the testing/accreditation companies who could better differentiate potential hires based on their actual ability would be more trusted by the hiring companies, and would be able to command higher prices.
> A college education is like money: It has value because we all agree that it has value.
Sticking with the same analogy: if you rapidly increase the amount of money in circulation, its value falls. The people whose wages and prices are rising in tandem experience little net change. But people whose wages don't rise suffer from the rising prices.
College is undergoing the same process. The fraction of people who go to college is up significantly. All those new degrees have pushed the absolute value of a degree down, which is why college is no longer an automatic path to high-paying, white-collar work. But at the same time, people without degrees are left ever further behind, and the relative gap between college and no-college is bigger than ever.
The system of higher education isn't going to change because people have too much invested in it, and that investment can never go bad like the housing market or tech stocks did. College graduates will talk about how much they learned, the networking and social experience or of being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking. It isn't possible to question the value of those intangible benefits, or to prove to someone that they could have gained the same things through other means. So the system perpetuates itself.
To be honest, it seems like an unbreakable cycle. Well off kids go to college, get jobs and move into management where they hire other well off kids who also went to college. MOOCs, community/online colleges and vocational schools are emerging as additional options, but most of the decision makers at major institutions attended traditional four year colleges and expect the people they work with to have done so as well.
It seems like the best way to control the cost of education would be to make employers responsible for paying for it, instead of the students. Then market forces would come into play. If a business had to choose between paying $120k to send someone to Harvard or $20k to send them to a state school or community college, then they would have an incentive to evaluate the difference in quality of education and training from the respective institutions. Right now all of the financial risk is placed on students, and businesses get to pick and choose who to hire with relatively little consequence.
Obviously the system isn't going to change any time soon, if ever, no matter how many opeds the washington post publishes.